My Bourgeois Apocalypse by Helen Rickerby

Where to start with a description of this book? Poems that are a “poetic collage-essay memoir’ says the back cover. My best advice is to start at the back of the book in the Notes page, where Helen Rickerby gives us her own take:

I crafted these poems from (mostly) randomly selected sentences from my journals from February 2019 to October 2024 – maybe the weirdest years of my life (so far). All sorts of things made it into my journals (and therefore into these poems) – as well as lots of whining and diaryish writing, memories, recollections of conversations to be had, there’s notes for and drafts of poems and other creative writing, writing exercises, lists, plans, dreams, daydreams, drafts of emails, quotations of things written by other people that I have wanted to record for various reasons, Italian homework and occasional paid work notes.

I wonder if it helps to know this at the beginning, or if it is better to not know until the end when you may be trying to make sense of what you have read.

I had previously read Rickerby’s ‘How to Live’ which won New Zealand poetry book of the year at the Ockham Book Awards in 2020. In my review I wrote:  “‘How to Live’ is a great collection. It bills itself as poetry, but to me it feels like a book of poetry that has no poems. Instead we are constantly pushing the boundary as to what is a poem, what is prose and what is an essay. What isn’t in any doubt is just how enjoyable this all is.”

In My Bourgeois Apocalypse we are pushing that debate even further, with the forty pieces all being in the style of a prose poem, never more than a page and a bit, sometimes only just a page long. Each piece has a number and a title, and always the title is in parenthesis.

Sometimes I thought we were listening to a series of non sequiturs. For example, this sequence is taken from the poem called “(I realised I did not have a favourite tree)”:

‘I don’t know if my soul and heart could fit many more like this. I have an ambivalent relationship with this tree-  in the middle of summer in the middle of the day I am grateful for its shade, but the rest of the time I resent it for mostly blocking out the sunlight. Pursue happiness. I was going to walk to Cathedral Square, but I decided to keep walking along the river. We danced for hours, virtually sober, and it was great. At first Mum wasn’t sure it was a stroke, but it was. Now there are only three seagulls watching us – S says the other one has gone for reinforcements.’

There is a randomness about some of the narrative. Here is an example from (During lockdown I was so busy coping with my feelings about the crisis that I didn’t really have time to work, but instead we wrote a blog about music from the early 90s):

‘Today S went to the supermarket, which was exciting. I’m going to pause this to write about Milli Vanilli. That sounded like a mouse in our kitchen! Anyway, it was too soon and it felt too – short? I can barely remember. I’m quite sore again this evening – I might try a different pillow.’

The use of just an initial letter for the names of all the people in the book – given that there is a narrative thread that we  sometimes think we are able to follow – makes it hard to recall the most significant letters in the book; S L C A V N Q R J P K F B M D O. That is sixteen, there may be more, and I wondered if we were going to reach the whole alphabet. S is the most significant person, and around him swirl uncertainties, good moments and bad ones. Sometimes there seems to be a relationship, at other times I was not so sure.

The time-line. Just before the first poem it says February 2019, and after the last, October 2024. The forty pieces (discounting the ‘sort of prologue’) cover five and a half years, but at what pace we are never quite sure. There is almost no other reference to time, and any passage of time is initially marked by Covid lockdowns and the occasional number of days. That some poems are close it time to each other is signalled by direct quotations from a number of books. Here are some that caught my eye – Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet), Rousseau (Essay on the Origin of Languages), Heather Christie (The Crying Book), Rebecca Solnit (Recollections of My Non-Existence), Debora Levy (The Cost of Living and Real Estate), Annie Ernaux (A Girl’s Story and The Possession), Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking and The White Album). References to one or two appear as many as four times, most get only one or two.

There is quite a lot of Italian peppered through the poems. Rickerby is taking Italian lessons and these lead to various one line quotes which add yet another element to the whole.

I have not figured out exactly what is happening with the titles of each poem – sometimes these seem to be completely unrelated to what you are about to read, as though the author knows something more, but is unwilling to tell us what it is. In the poem with the title ‘When I got so panicky about the building work that we had to move out of our house for a couple of weeks’ there seems to be no reference this this at all, as though the title stands alone as its own story.

As you can tell, there is a great deal going on in these poems, both obvious and hidden. When you think you know what might be happening for a page or two, suddenly everything will change and become opaque again. Persevere, live a little while inside each one, you never know what you are going to find there.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Auckland University Press